


Lullabies for Little Miss

by friendlyneighborhoodsecretary



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Lots and Lots of Ironfam Feels, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie) Spoilers, Tony Stark Lives, Tony's Recovery, ironfam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22135897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary/pseuds/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary
Summary: She looked at Peter rather than Happy when she asked about her parents, eying the gleaming metal suit that wrapped him from head to toe and the smudges of battle sweat and grime as if they made him some sort of expert on what had happened when the world tilted on its axis. In a way, he supposed he was, given how often his own personal world tipped. Not that that had ever made him any better at dealing with it.“They’re…ah…busy.” Or at discussing it. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t sure there was a good way to explain to a little girl that her dad took a bullet for the universe.The hazy days after the Second Snap aren't easy for anyone, least of all for Morgan Stark. Fortunately, she doesn't have to endure them alone. And neither does the rest of the family.
Relationships: Happy Hogan & Morgan Stark, Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark, Nebula & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Pepper Potts & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 25
Kudos: 83





	1. The Itsy Bitsy Spider

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a fluffy, unstructured little fic about various people singing to Morgan and then suddenly it became a thing about the family holding it together during Tony's uncertain recovery period (with bits of fluff thrown in just for balance). Fics have a mind of their own, friends...it's wild.
> 
> As always, thank you all for dropping by! I hope you enjoy!

Peter had spotted the tent in Tony Stark’s backyard the night before, when a nameless wizard who clearly had more important things to worry about had hustled him through his second spinning copper portal of the day and into Happy’s waiting arms. _Literally_ into his arms, since he’d spent at least the first minute crushed against Happy’s shoulder in a bearhug that just made the most surreal day of his life seem that much more unbelievable. He hadn’t had time to think about the tiny floral print contraption as Happy ushered him through the surrounding grove of trees toward the warm lights of a cabin tucked further up the banks of the lake. There was too much to see, too much to process, too much information to pass on and rapid-fire questions from Happy to answer. The clues—from the small bike abandoned half-in and half-out of the bushes, the muddy little shoes drying at the bottom of the porch steps, the dim outline of a treehouse peeking from the branches of a nearby oak—didn’t click until Peter reached the doorway and found it blocked by a kid—a real, live _kid_ in Tony Stark’s house—with Iron Man pjs and expectant brown eyes. Shockingly familiar brown eyes.

“Oh,” Peter breathed. So five years wasn’t an exaggeration. Of all the signs he would’ve taken as proof that so much time truly had passed him by, this was easily the most mind-bendy. “ _Oh.”_

“Oh.” The kid said, shoulders drooping when no amount of craning around the doorway revealed anyone besides Peter and Happy. There was a spark of curiosity in her eyes as Happy shooed them both inside to make the somewhat awkward introductions, but it was quickly buried under an avalanche of questions that neither Peter nor Happy could adequately answer. _Where’s Daddy? Is Mommy coming back tonight? What’s happening?_

She looked at him rather than Happy when she asked, eying the gleaming metal suit that wrapped him from head to toe and the smudges of battle sweat and grime as if they made him some sort of expert on what had happened when the world tilted on its axis. In a way, he supposed he was, given how often his own personal world tipped. Not that that had ever made him any better at dealing with it.

“They’re…ah…busy.” Or at discussing it. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t sure there _was_ a good way to explain to a little girl that her dad took a bullet for the universe.

The kid— _Morgan_ , her name was Morgan —pursed her lips and shot him the same skeptical look he’d seen a million times on a much older face as Happy took her hand to guide her upstairs to bed. Peter sagged against the doorway at the jolt that went through him with that look, with that _face,_ screwing his eyes shut to block out the last image he had of Tony with the charred flesh and empty eyes and the slowing, stuttering heartbeat. He listened to the two sets of footsteps recede into the upper level of the cabin and sucked in a deep breath to ward off the wave of nausea rising in his gullet. He hadn’t wanted to come here, to be shunted off to the sidelines while Tony fought for his life in a Wakandan operating room—it felt like abandonment. Like a betrayal of the loyalty Peter lived by. For a brief moment, his thoughts had slipped away from that focal point, drawn away by the tasks of catching Happy up on what little he knew about had happened and being caught up himself on the state of the world he had been dropped back into. Now, those thoughts roared back to life louder than ever.

He didn’t sleep, despite the luxuriant guest room and the battle exhaustion throbbing through his bones. His ears, primed for the ring of a cellphone or the ding of an update text with any news on Tony or on May (who had evidently vanished right along with Peter), pricked on every sound. Because there _were_ sounds. He hadn’t had much experience with country life, but he’d always heard its defining feature was the quiet—a “fact” that was evidently an out-and-out lie. It wasn’t true silence, like the endless orange void he glimpsed in the snatches of rest that came here and there. The lake lapped gently against the dock in its steady, muted tide. The tree leaves whispered in the mild spring breeze. Distant night birds gossiped softly among their branches, animals tiptoed through the brush, nameless little insects hummed—it was a steady, grating undertone of noise. Nothing compared to the comforting cacophony of Queens, just…noise. While Queens shouted, always declaring its vim and vigor and _life_ in the constant roar of taxi engines and the boisterous hollers of people along the sidewalks and the comforting buzz of a million glittering lights…Tony Stark’s forest felt like it was perpetually holding its breath. Just like Peter.

The night spent on high alert left him even more exhausted than before. Which wasn’t ideal for the task ahead of him now.

“Hey, um…Morgan? Can you come down? Please?”

“No! I’m busy!” A defiant shout echoed back down to him through the slats of the treehouse perched over Peter’s head. It was a loose, simple build, just rough enough that Peter suspected Morgan had had a hand in designing it. He could see her through the open trapdoor at the junction where trunk met floorboard, a pair of sneakers dangling through the opening and a sleepy scowl aimed at him from overhead. She hadn’t slept, either; Peter knew that for a fact. He’d heard her whispering to her stuffed animals as the night wore on, spinning soft fairytales about knights in armor who always came home and princesses who built forts with their fathers. But her voice had been uncertain. Just as her eyes were now.

“Oh, yeah? Do you think you could maybe take a little break? Happy said you usually do a nap sometime around—”

“ _No!_ ”

Peter blinked at the force of the rebuttal, skittering a half-step back and raising his hands in a placating sort of surrender. That…hadn’t been what he’d been expecting. None of it had been, from the moment he had volunteered to keep an eye on Morgan while Happy tried to juggle all the many details of what happened to a tech conglomerate and its employees after the apocalypse pulled an Uno-reverse to the second she’d left Peter in the dust to book it out of the house and up into the trees. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him—or at least he didn’t _think_ so—but that she seemed to think there were far more important things to be doing…Whatever that was.

Peter sighed. He was usually better with kids, whether it be helping Ned (who was, apparently, also among the missing) wrangle his little sister when they were left to babysit or shepherding lost kindergarteners home during his patrols. It was easy—approach like a friend rather than a parent, chatter a little bit about whatever they thought was cool, steer clear of talking down to them, and he usually had a new friend for life in forty seconds flat…Maybe he was just off his game. It wouldn’t be surprising since it still felt like he was blundering through the day in a haze.

He shifted back on his heels to get a better view and caught a solid glimpse of where Morgan now perched by the nearest windowsill, pillowing her head on her arms and staring drowsily out over the landscape like a sleepy little sentry.

“So…uh…what are you busy doing?”

“Looking for spinny things,” Morgan muttered through her sleeves

“Uh…spinny things?”

“Spinny things!” She flailed her little arms in a fair imitation of the wizard’s portal moves. “Like you came out of! I _saw you_ come out of one last night!”

“Ohhh.” Peter felt something in his stomach sink as he realized what she was looking for. Why it was so important to wait out the afternoon so vigilantly. “Morgan, I’m really sorry, but there probably aren’t going to be any more portals today—"

“How do you know? If you came out of one, then so could—so could—” Morgan cut off, lower lip wobbling on the edge of the words and big brown eyes clouding ominously up. Peter edged a step closer, shaking his head as he scrabbled for the right words. He knew that look. He’d _worn_ that look plenty of times during the shadow days that fell near the funeral that had bisected his childhood into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ Being small in the middle of a big crisis meant that no matter how much of it went over year head, more than enough tumbled down to create that sense of unease that no one would explain, the bewildering wrongness of who was missing and why, and the deep, unshakeable knowledge that something was terribly, terribly wrong even if you didn’t know the words to voice why you knew it.

Peter swallowed and scraped an awkward hand through his curls, trying to ignore the guilty realization pricking in the back of his mind. He distinctly remembered being five and crouched under the kitchen table in Ben and May’s apartment, hiding from the overwhelming sense of dread under his tablecloth cave while the adults traded urgent whispers in the other room. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be. He couldn’t imagine that treehouse was, either.

He slipped into familiar rambling as he did his best to ward off any tears from the kid on the other side of the little stand-off. “Oh, whoa, hey, hey, hey—it’s okay. It’s fine, we can totally look for spinny things if you want to! It’s cool! Do you think maybe I could come and help—”

“ _NO!_ ” Morgan’s voice rose in volume, sharp with the petulance of sleep deprivation. Peter winced. Great. So much for a peace offering. He sighed and turned to put his back to the tree trunk, gradually sliding down the bark until he hit the ground. He was tired. So tired. Tired of trading blows with aliens and hopping through “spinny things” (no matter how cool they had been at first) and squabbling with a kid who was just as scared as he was. Too tired to blink without his eyes burning or to yawn without the sensation that his jaw was going to break with the force of it. He might need a nap more than Morgan did, honestly, but there was no way to settle the worry knots in his chest until he knew something about Tony, about May, about any of the other weights pressing in on him. And sleep never mixed well with worry. He couldn’t blame Morgan for fighting it.

“Okay….well…guess I’ll just hang out down here, then,” Peter called up into the branches, tamping down a wave of exhaustion-fueled frustration of his own. Technically, he supposed he was still being somewhat successful. He was keeping an eye on Tony’s kid. He was keeping them _both_ out of Happy’s hair during the critical first few hours. So what if they were both miserable?

It took another ten minutes before Morgan broke their stubborn silence.

“How’d you find me up here?” She spoke cautiously, as if feeling him out. Possibly just for the next escape attempt. But Peter would take it. At least she wasn’t yelling. If anything, her voice slurred even further towards the edge of sleep. Peter snuck a glance upwards, abruptly half afraid that she’d fall asleep right there and topple out of that precarious little trapdoor.

“I heard you moving around.” That had been the only thing that saved him from a heart attack when he’d noticed she was gone, actually. For a few heart-stopping seconds before the sound of shifting leaves and groaning tree branches reached his sensitive hearing, he’d believed he’d _actually lost Tony Stark’s kid_ before he even finished his first hour of babysitting. “I’ve got good ears.”

“Spider ears?”

Peter’s eyes widened a fraction and his pulse hitched before logic caught up with instinctual panic. So they’d told her. Why wouldn’t they, if he was evidently dead and gone with no identity left to protect and no family remaining to feel the residual backlash of any alias leaks? It was probably a moot point by now. Still. It unnerved him a little.

“Uh huh. Exactly.”

Morgan wrinkled her nose thoughtfully.

“If you’ve got spider ears, do you have any spider songs?”

“…Spider songs?”

“My music class was supposed to be today…Daddy always takes me.” Morgan’s voice shrunk at the last phrase, as if treading even that close to the subject they were both avoiding made her uneasy.

“Oh,” Peter murmured. That wasn’t the Tony Stark he knew. But then, none of this was. Of all the places Peter could have envisioned Tony Stark eventually retiring to, a literal cabin in the woods was not one of them. An honest-to-goodness cabin, complete with a gravel road that spat too many pebbles and too much grit to be friendly to imported sports cars and an actual barn with an actual alpaca and too much hay dust and animal dung to be kind to designer suits. Not one thing during the whirlwind tour Morgan had grudgingly given him before breakfast had meshed with the Tony Peter knew—or _had_ known, he supposed, seeing as how this Tony had apparently put a lot of distance between himself and Peter’s version during the five-year lapse. Peter kicked idly at the rocks near his heels, barely holding in the urge to vent the pent-up tension and send said rocks hurtling into the stratosphere. Frankly, he wasn’t sure how to feel about any of the new developments. Particularly since Tony wasn’t around to be asked about any of it.

“So? Can you sing?”

Peter considered for a moment, one hand coming up to thumb away the grit collecting at the corners of his eyes. He wondered if she would’ve asked if she wasn’t already on the verge of dropping over even without the help of a lullaby. It was out of his wheelhouse, and it felt wildly unproductive compared to all the things he felt like he _should_ have been doing to help fix the whole not-quite-apocalypse thing. But if keeping Morgan busy and distracted and looked after was at the top of that list…and if Morgan wanted singing…that was that. He cleared his throat.

“The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.” He started soft, a low hum to cover the lake rippling a few yards away. Briefly, he wondered if the only spider song he knew was too babyish for a—what? Four-year-old? Five-year-old, at the very most? —but there were no complaints issued from on high, so he went on. “Down came the rain and washed the spider out.”

He cycled through the rest of the lyrics and repeated them twice, relaxing into the repetition because there was nothing else to do now. He didn’t realize he was beginning to drift himself until the ladder boards nailed into the trunk at his back creaked and he was jolted fully awake by the sensation of a warm weight plopping down on the leaves at his side.

“Hi,” he murmured, holding in the sigh of relief that at least Morgan wouldn’t come toppling out of the tree any time soon.

“Hi. You were falling asleep, y’know.” Morgan informed him as she scrubbed a sluggish hand across her eyes and settled against the tree. She pulled her knees up to her chest to curl into a cozy little ball. “C’you keep singing? It’s…nice.”

It was a _distraction_ , that’s what it was…Just another attempt to fend off that dreaded nap. Still, Peter gave her a quiet grin.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I can do that.”

Another three rounds of lilting nursery rhyme, and Morgan has listed against his side, tiny snores whistling through cracked lips as she slept. Peter debated struggling to his feet to carry her inside and then see if there was anything else he could help Happy with. He could hear him from time to time, dim and distant through the cabin walls as he paced from room to room with his phone glued to his ear. Peter caught occasional glimpses of him cracking the shades to check up on them through the windows every so often, but so far he hadn’t caught enough of a break to leave the cabin. Peter caught snatches of conversation, lone phrases and harried orders about “temporary housing” and “disaster relief packages” and “yes, that’s _May_ , M-A-Y. Last name: Parker,” and decided that eavesdropping from here was just about as helpful as eavesdropping from inside would be.

There was nothing left to do but wait. He let his eyes fall shut, eased into the darkness by the shade of the leafy canopy overhead, and felt himself begin to drift again. It was easier now than before with Morgan slumped against his ribs, weighing down the jittery, terrified energy that had coursed through him since the night before. He couldn’t move very much in any direction without the risk of disturbing her. And really, he doubted it would do anyone much good even if he tried it. Whatever was happening on the other side of the world was happening without the two of them and would continue to do so, regardless of how much Peter—and Morgan, for that matter—agitated about it. There was nothing he could do and nowhere he could be of more use than here, letting a little girl snore into his shirt.

He supposed there were worse places to wait. He let his eyes slide half-shut, the lake before him blurring into a glittering sheet of blue to block out the orange that had ruled his sleep thus far. Yes, there were _definitely_ much worse places to wait, now that he thought about it. It was still excruciating just sitting and twiddling his thumbs while the rest of the people in his life were caught in the middle of action he couldn’t help them with—but at least he didn’t have to wait it out alone. Peter gently extricated his arm, shifting to wrap it around Morgan’s shoulders as she dozed. Regardless of what news came or what portals opened…they’d be here when it happened. Waiting.


	2. Star Light, Star Bright

"Will he be okay?" When she finally spoke, Morgan's voice was startlingly solemn against the backdrop of serene lakeside quiet.

The two of them leaned against a mossy boulder set into the sloping east bank of the lake, far enough away from the turmoil in the cabin for silence to reign but close enough for Nebula to keep watch on the goings-on if she cranked her sensors high enough. Most of it had died down by now, the muted beeps and hisses of medical equipment replacing the bustle and clatter the set-up of said equipment had produced, but what remained still felt jarring. _Wrong_ , even, when mixed with the night birds calling and the soft “pla-plunk” of the pebbles Morgan half-heartedly pitched into the shallows. But there was no denying reality. And no avoiding the question.

“Will he?” Morgan persisted, melting further against Nebula’s side as if the added pressure would produce a quicker answer. Nebula found herself a bit surprised that such a small, sleepy voice could bear such a great weight. But she could not be surprised by the question itself. Until now, Morgan hadn't even asked about whether or not her father would come home from his six-week stint in a Wakandan recovery unit; she had assumed. The question had been “when,” not “if.” The fact that Tony Stark was indestructible was a given. A certainty.

Or at least it had been until he was wheeled off the private jet on a gurney, silent and still and swathed in yards of bandages that couldn’t quite manage to cover the mottled scars and charred wounds.

The assembled family had tried to keep Morgan away, to shield her from things she didn't need to see—but there was no stopping the daughter of the world's most indomitable CEO. Nebula had to admire her tenacity, even if the failure to keep her safe rankled. It only took a glimpse, a stolen stare caught over Hogan's shoulder as he swept her up to retreat to the rear of the cabin while the rest of them pitched in to help move Stark into the newly outfitted medical suite that was temporarily replacing the master bedroom.

"Maybe. Probably." Nebula paused and considered what she knew of humans. She weighed it against the answer that she wanted, against the implausible whine that ached behind her ribs. What she knew of Tony Stark won out. " _Yes_. Eventually."

Morgan stayed quiet for a moment, idly fidgeting with the pile of little stones still in her lap.

"How do you know?"

"Instinct. Your father is a stubborn man; he will prevail."

Morgan's nose wrinkled with blatant uncertainty, and Nebula cursed the narrowing gap in their experience. They were more alike than they should have been now, both the daughters of legends. Of titans on opposite sides of the chessboard. But while Nebula had had years to learn the pain of caring for a father whose legacy far exceeded his children, Morgan knew nothing of it. While Nebula was forged among cold stars and constant pain, Morgan was nurtured in a quiet forest with blissful ignorance of who her father was or what he would be called upon to do. She knew…nothing, really. And she knew loss the least of all. Nebula wished it could stay that way.

"What happened to him?" Morgan scraped two pebbles together between small hands, bleary eyes somber as she tipped her head back to watch Nebula’s response. She had always been watchful that way. Bright and sharp and fiercely intelligent in a way that Nebula had always found endearingly familiar, even since she’d been a small pink bundle thrust into Nebula’s arms to hold while Stark walked her through the tour of his new rural paradise. Now, the familiarity stung. Nebula stole one of the pebbles from the pile Morgan had collected and rolled it along her fingers to listen to the blessedly distracting metallic clink.

"He was wounded."

"Like when I fell out of the treehouse?" Nebula felt a traitorous upward curl of her lip coming on. That particular crisis had resulted in a broken fibula, a hot-rod red cast, and a month of Morgan insisting on piggyback rides from anyone who came within reach, Nebula included. It had been difficult in its own way, if the dramatic messages she’d received from Stark during the weeks she was off-world were anything to go by. But it had not been like this.

"No. Like..." Nebula considered her options. Morgan remained sheltered from most of her family's exploits, for the most part. She knew snatches and snippets of what her father had done before he was a house husband, of what her Uncle Rhodey did now, of what Nebula herself did when she vanished into the cosmos for months at a time—but it was all censored. Sanitized and distilled into simple, manageable little stories. _Safe_ stories that focused heavily on the thrill of flying, the funniest quips, and what this or that alien world looked like as opposed to the blood and screams and battle wounds. It had taken time for Nebula to get used to that, to how drastically different this approach to childrearing was from how her own formative years had gone. But it was _good._ That sort of protection was what Morgan deserved. Nebula didn’t want to be the one to spoil it. "...like when I had to stay in your father's garage."

It had an almost a year since then, but Morgan evidently remembered enough for her eyes to widen and her head to bob in a solemn nod. It had been...bad. For all of them. A skirmish during a mission with Rocket had gone woefully wrong and Nebula had been rushed to Earth—to the one mechanic in the universe she could even half-way trust. Stark had spent three days straight with her in the lakehouse garage, piecing and patching and threading her back together until she was whole again. Nebula's own memories of the event were fuzzy, dimmed by the careful attention to proper pain relief and effective anesthesia Stark had insisted upon. Nebula still didn't know how much Morgan had been told. But whatever it was, it had been enough to communicate the severity of the situation. A severity that still didn’t touch the disaster unfolding around them now.

Morgan paused, the sound of the pebbles she'd been clacking together dying abruptly away.

"If he had to fix you...who's gonna fix him?"

"He has to fix himself." That much was true, if greatly simplified. The machines and medication and round-the-clock surveillance kept Stark steady. They maintained him. But if he was to make any further progress, he would have to do it himself.

"Oh." Morgan bit her lip. Her brow furrowed with the warring emotions that flitted across her face. "Well...he's really good at fixing things..."

But, the unspoken doubt echoed, how could a shell of a man fix anything?

Because that's what he was now, a shell, seared on the outside and either empty or trapped on the inside. Nebula hoped— _wished_ —that the grit and determination and stubbornness under pressure that she'd learned to appreciate was still present somewhere under the vacant face. Hopes and wishes were not something she liked to depend on. Not when it mattered. But there was little else to depend on for now.

“You should sleep,” Nebula murmured with a gentle nudge to the lump pressed against her side. That had been the reason for spiriting the child out here into the quiet, after all. Putting her to sleep so Pepper wouldn’t have to was the most Nebula could do to be helpful now. Not that that would make it easy. Or even particularly successful, given that Morgan’s usual bedtime had ticked past hours ago.

"Don't wanna."

"You must." Nebula had watched most of the cabin's lights blink out, one by one. Pepper's remained on, a beacon shining down upon them from the second floor where she held her vigil by Stark's bedside, and the kitchen still glowed with the soft pulse of the single fixture left on while the Parker woman and Hogan cleared away the remains of the very, very late dinner the rest of them had grabbed in nibbles stolen here and there, but the rest of the place had gone dark. The living room, where the Parker boy snored into the couch in pure exhaustion, Rhodey's room, where he would doze until the wee hours when he would take Pepper's place sitting with Tony, the empty halls that tied them all together—all hollow and shadowed.

"What if...what if something happens before I wake up?" There was a faint tremor in Morgan’s voice then, a fear that hadn't been there when the day had begun. A shard of innocence lost with the realization that other losses might be in the offing. Nebula sighed, the new kinship sitting heavy in her chest. She shifted to rest a hand on Morgan's small shoulder.

"Don't concern yourself—I will be here to watch while you rest." It would not be the first time she had stood watch over a sleeping Stark. Nebula glanced back at the cabin, at the light burning from the room among the gables. It would not be the last time, either. Once her shift with this Stark was done, she would go to relieve whoever sat with the other one.

Morgan sighed and listed sideways to lean more heavily against Nebula's ribs. Either that deal was acceptable or the magnitude of the day’s events were catching up with her. The calm of lakeside night engulfed them, the hum of early-season crickets and wind stirring among the reeds a lullaby that might have lured even Nebula to sleep if she hadn't had other concerns on her mind.

"Star light, star bright..." The muted melody from Nebula's side startled her. She glanced down to find Morgan's head tilted skyward as she hummed, gazing at the sky above with drowsy eyes. Morgan Stark loved few things as much as she loved the stars. Nebula wasn’t sure whether it grew out of the unquenchable curiosity for all things shiny and complicated that all Starks seemed to share or whether it came from being raised on the shores of her own private lake, where—between the constellations wheeling above and their reflection shimmering on the water's mirror surface—the night was always awash with them. Wherever it stemmed from, Nebula found it a great irony, given that the child's father had only recently stopped trembling at the sight of them. "The first star I see tonight…"

Morgan mumbled her way through a chorus that wandered through two rounds of “Star Light, Star Bright,” swerved briefly into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and finally circled back into the wistful tune she’d started with. Nebula wondered if it was a method of self-soothing—the child loved music, that much she knew from her previous visits when she watched Morgan sing duets with her father to whatever playlist cycled through the workshop's speakers, squall giddy, tuneless songs on bright dockside afternoons, or croon the same soft nursey rhyme Morgan now sang—or if it was just a stalling technique. It could be either, she supposed. But she couldn't blame her for pursuing either choice.

“I wish I may, I wish I might…”

Nebula cleared her throat as Morgan's jaw popped in a yawn that interrupted the song for a solid ten seconds. The little girl sighed and let her head loll over to rest more heavily on Nebula's arm, the gradual shift in her breathing pattern clue enough that she was slipping into the uncertain twilight between wakefulness and sleep. Nebula scooted aside for enough leverage to scoop the girl up for the walk back inside, but Morgan let out an ominous grumble. Nebula froze as Morgan’s eyelashes fluttered and the girl stirred, tipping back towards consciousness. Nebula sighed. With little else to do, she picked up the thread of melody where Morgan had left it.

"I wish I may, I wish I might," Nebula rasped, wincing at the rusty sensation of forcing music from vocal cords that were never meant for lullabies. The song didn't flow for her the way it did for Morgan. But Nebula suspected that was not what Morgan wanted out of the tune anyway. She wanted comfort. Familiarity. One thing that remained certain and unchanged even as the rest of her world spun off its orbit. Nebula could manage that. And she would.

“…have the wish I wish tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Feel free to drop a comment with any thoughts you have or stop by and say hello on [Tumblr](https://friendlyneighborhoodsecretary.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Feel free to drop a comment with any thoughts you have or stop by and say hello on [Tumblr](https://friendlyneighborhoodsecretary.tumblr.com/)


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